[Cryptography] Toxic Combination

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Fri Dec 12 01:15:47 EST 2014


On 12/11/14 at 12:25 AM, grarpamp at gmail.com (grarpamp) wrote:

>What is the revenue model of AES, OpenPGP, SHA3, ECDHE...?

In the case of AES, many companies agreed they needed a common, 
trusted encryption algorithm to replace DES. NIST ran a 
competition to select one and AES was the result. Many companies 
have build products that incorporate AES. QED

In the case of OpenPGP, PGP was built by Phil Zimmermann for 
political reasons to protect activist's data. Commercial use 
required a fee. I agree that PGP was not primarily motivated by 
the profit motive. Its success was due to being the only choice 
available, and the fact that it worked. Note that PGP 
Corporation was a purely commercial enterprise based on PGP.

SHA3's history is similar to AES. It is also driven by 
commercial interests which need compatibility and trust.

The Diffie Hellman algorithm was granted U.S. Patent 4,200,770 
and was assigned to Stanford University. While Stanford's 
interest was primarily in encouraging academic research, they 
did try to make money licensing the patent. ECDHE is an 
implementation of Diffie Hellman using elliptic curves instead 
of modular integer multiplication which gives faster 
implementation with smaller data. Again, the commercial 
interests drove ECDH's adoption (after negotiating a minefield 
of patents).


>What of protocol creator Bitcoin, Pond, FOSS... where the revenue them?

I wouldn't be surprised if the developer of the Bitcoin protocol 
didn't extract some money as an early adopter. There is, of 
course, no proof.

I don't recognize Pond or FOSS, and I've done enough free 
research for tonight.

Cheers - Bill

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